Twitter at the 2010 Lilly Conference on College Teaching (#lilly10)

I was honored to give the opening keynote at the 2010 Lilly Conference on College Teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, last week. My other role at the conference was to encourage the use of Twitter for conference backchannel discussions. I helped the conference team settle on a hashtag (#lilly10), recruited a few Twitter users who were going to the conference to agree to contribute to the backchannel (our “Twitter Team“), and shared an introduction to Twitter (in video and Prezi formats) with the conference participants. I also set up a Twapper Keeper for the #lilly10 hashtag to archive the tweets.

As seems to be the custom these days, I thought I would share a little summary and analysis of the Lilly tweets. I learned from Twapper Keeper about a tool called Summarizr that does most of this automatically. Here are the results:

Word Clouds:

Here’s a word cloud of the tweets created using Wordle. I’ve removed the #lilly10 hashtag (since it’s in all the tweets) but otherwise haven’t edited the text of the tweets. Click on the image below to see a larger version.

The presence of several Twitter user names (including my own…) means not that these users were tweeting often but instead that other users were replying to these users. This gives you a sense of who was having conversations on the backchannel with whom.

If we eliminate those user names, however, we get a somewhat clearer sense of what people were talking about:

My observations: We tweeted a lot about students (sometimes abbreviating students to stdts) and learning. (Note the use of student and learn as well.) Teaching, conference, session, and great were also frequently tweeted words. Perhaps we need to expand our repertoire of positive adjectives beyond great and interesting…

2 Responses to "Twitter at the 2010 Lilly Conference on College Teaching (#lilly10)"

[…] academic conferences (the MLA, the Joint Mathematics Meetings, the POD Network Conference, and the Lilly Conference to name a few that I followed). Atkinson’s book was somewhat prescient back in January 2010. […]

[…] Analyze & Report — After the conference, analyze and report on the conference tweets. You might report on the number of conference tweets, the number of individuals who tweeted during the conference, and the top ten or twenty most active conference tweeters. Summarizr is a free tool that will do this kind of analysis for you. Here’s the Summarizr report for the #lilly10 hashtag, for example. Also, Twapper Keeper lets you download all the tweets in your archive as an Excel file for further analysis. You might copy and paste the tweets into Wordle.net to create a word cloud of the conference backchannel. When creating a word cloud, you might want to create one that includes Twitter user names and one that doesn’t. You can see such word clouds in my report on the POD Network conference tweets and in my Lilly Conference backchannel report. […]